Sunday is here – the day of celebration. As if the sacrifice wasn’t enough – the Great Friday, the biggest expression of love anyone can show a person.  As if we needed more, than to know someone has given up THEIR life for ours. And yet we should know God by now – there is more. There is always more.

It was more than just a sacrificial action of love – the sacrifice served a purpose.

Jesus – the perfect, spotless, blameless one, came as fully God and yet fully man to accomplish one task.  To make a way for people to connect with His father. To take care of “once and for all” (Hebrews10), the very thing that separated God from His people.

He took our sin, He nailed it to a cross.

Colossians 2: 14-15  says “He cancelled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross.  In this way He disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by His victory over them on the cross”

The cross achieved so much more – he was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed (Isaiah 53 NLT)

So we now have –

1. A love that goes beyond anything we will experience here on earth, sacrificial, a gift, unconditional.

2. A sacrifice that disarms the enemy who is set out to destroy our lives.

3. Our debts paid so we could experience a wholeness – spirit, soul and body.

And then to top it all off and the reason we celebrate today, the final showdown – Jesus who dies on Friday, and achieving so much by his death, walks out of the tomb 3 days later – and it’s more than Him simply being alive again. For Him to be alive – He had to defeat death.  The final hold that the devil had on God’s people – the power of death, and Jesus defeats him in this grand finale to win mankind completely.

Death, where is your sting?

Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had  the power of death. Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying. (Hebrews 2 v 14-15)

So death has no power and Jesus fully alive is why today is so incredibly important. Easter in incredible (chocolate is epic) but this entire thing will always be about Him.

We are forever changed at the cross, and fully alive in God because of the resurrected Jesus.

Happy Easter